[278] Paley’s last work, “Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of A Deity, collected from the Appearances of Nature,” was published in 1802.
[279] For Southey’s well known rejoinder to this “ebullience of schematism,” see Life and Correspondence, ii. 220-223.
[280] Southey’s correspondence contains numerous references to the historian Sharon Turner [1768-1847], and to William Owen, the translator of the Mabinogion and author of the Welsh Paradise Lost.
[281] It may be interesting to compare the following unpublished note from Coleridge’s Scotch Journal with the well known passage in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal of her tour in the Highlands (Memoir of Wordsworth, i. 235): “Next morning we went in the boat to the end of the lake, and so on by the old path to the Garrison to the Ferry House by Loch Lomond, where now the Fall was in all its fury, and formed with the Ferry cottage, and the sweet Highland lass, a nice picture. The boat gone to the preaching we stayed all day in the comfortless hovel, comfortless, but the two little lassies did everything with such sweetness, and one of them, 14, with such native elegance. Oh! she was a divine creature! The sight of the boat, full of Highland men and women and children from the preaching, exquisitely fine. We soon reached E. Tarbet—all the while rain. Never, never let me forget that small herd-boy in his tartan-plaid, dim-seen on the hilly field, and long heard ere seen, a melancholy voice calling to his cattle! nor the beautiful harmony of the heath, and the dancing fern, and the ever-moving birches. That of itself enough to make Scotland visitable, its fields of heather giving a sort of shot silk finery in the apotheosis of finery. On Monday we went to Arrochar. Here I left W. and D. and returned myself to E. Tarbet, slept there, and now, Tuesday, Aug. 30, 1803, am to make my own way to Edinburgh.”
Many years after he added the words: “O Esteese, that thou hadst from thy 22nd year indeed made thy own way and alone!”
A sweet and playful Highland girl,
As light and beauteous as a squirrel,
As beauteous and as wild!
Her dwelling was a lonely house,
A cottage in a heathy dell;
And she put on her gown of green
And left her mother at sixteen,
And followed Peter Bell.
Peter Bell, Part III.
[283] Margaret Southey, who was born in September, 1802, died in the latter part of August, 1803.
[284] The “Pains of Sleep” was published for the first time, together with “Christabel” and “Kubla Khan,” in 1816. With the exception of the insertion of the remarkable lines 52-54, the first draft of the poem does not materially differ from the published version. A transcript of the same poem was sent to Poole in a letter dated October 3, 1803. Poetical Works, p. 170, and Editor’s Note, pp. 631, 632.
[285] The Rev. Peter Elmsley, the well known scholar, who had been a school and college friend of Southey’s, was at this time resident at Edinburgh. The Edinburgh Review had been founded the year before, and Elmsley was among the earliest contributors. His name frequently recurs in Southey’s correspondence.